1. CONFERENCES

ECAI will hold its 13th International Meeting April 8-12th, 2003 at the conference “Enter the Past: The e-Way into the Four Dimensions of Cultural Heritage” in Vienna, Austria. The conference is a joint venture of Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA), Workshop Archaologie und Computer, International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (UISPP) Com.4, AG Arch and ECAI. The venue will be the City Hall of Vienna. Please see www.enter-the-past.org for more information. If you wish to present at the meeting please contact ecai@socrates.berkeley.edu by January 3.

The fall 2003 ECAI Meeting will be held in conjunction with the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium, Bangkok, Thailand, November 14-16. Please see www.pnclink.org for more information.

The Social Science History Association Annual meeting will be held in Baltimore, MD, November 13-16, 2003. SSHA has become an important meeting for scholars interested in historical GIS. Please see www.ssha.org for more information. If you are interested in submitting a paper or panel, please contact Ruth Mostern, Historical Geography Network Co-Chair, ruth@socrates.berkeley.edu.

There have been ECAI and TimeMap presentations at a number of conferences this season, including SSHA (St. Louis), Virtual Systems and Multi-Media (Gyeongju, Korea), and the UNESCO World Heritage Virtual Congress (Alexandria, Egypt).

2. FUNDING

ECAI has received a grant of US$241,643.00 from the (United States Federal) Institute for Museum and Library Services. The project is titled: “Going Places in the Catalogue: Improved Geographical Access.” The Principal Investigator for the grant is ECAI Co-Director Michael Buckland. The focus of the project will be on developing ways of using online library catalogues with online gazetteers. The grant is for 24 months starting October 1, 2002.

The Fall 2002 Meeting of ECAI in Shimane and Osaka, Japan was funded by several grants, totaling $80,000.00. We are especially grateful to the C&C Foundation of Tokyo, the University of Shimane, and the City University of Osaka for the support. The meetings were organized at the local level by Prof. Shoichiro Hara of the National Institute of Japanese Literature, Prof. Ikuo Oketani of Osaka International University, Prof. Mamoru Shibayama of City University of Osaka, and Professor Tetsuya Katsumura of the University of Shimane. More than 350 delegates registered at the sessions held in Shimane and Osaka.

3. ECAI VISITORS

ECAI Central visitors during the past semester have included: Jie Eun Hwang (Korea Institute of Science and Technology), Jin Won Choi (Yonsei University, Seoul), Jianxiong Ge and Zhimin Man (Fudan University, Shanghai), I-chun Fan, William Ueng, Ovid Tseng (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Roland Fletcher, Ian Johnson (University of Sydney), Tsukasa Katsube, Kana Mochida (University of Shimane, Japan), Henry von Stietencron (University of Tuebingen, Germany). Maggie Exon (Curtin University, Australia) spent the month of October in residence at ECAI Central working with the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse. John Lehman (University of Alaska) will be in residence at ECAI Central during the coming semester.

4. ECAI SOUTHEAST ASIA WORKSHOP

A symposium and workshop, "New Horizons for Southeast Asia's Past: Global Approaches to Digital Archive Management" is planned for January 6-11 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The events are sponsored by APSARA, and the University of California Department of South and Southeast Asian Languages, and ECAI Southeast Asia. ECAI Southeast Asia Editor Caverlee Cary is project manager. Funding has come from the University of California Pacific Rim Program. For more information, please see www.gisc.berkeley.edu/projects/seaatlas/apsara.html.

5. PUBLICATIONS AND CONTENT

A recent article on GIS and Education has appeared in the University of California Office of President digital publication “Teaching, Learning, and Technology.” This article features ECAI among several GIS-based programs throughout the UC system. The article is available online at www.uctltc.org/news/2002/10/feature.html.

Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, edited by Anne Knowles (ESRI Press, 2002), which includes articles from several ECAI projects, is now being revised for a second edition. In addition to the volume, Prof. Knowles will also produce a CD ROM based on the material for use in classrooms.

The forthcoming issue of History and Computing (13.1) is a special issue on historical GIS edited by ECAI affiliates Paul Ell and Ian Gregory. It includes articles by many ECAI collaborators.

The Pacific Neighborhood Consortium will publish a CD ROM for the Fall 2003 meeting, including ECAI. Those who are interested in the proceedings should contact Prof. Oketani at PNC-core-w@nijl.ac.jp.

Our first ePublication, A Sasanian Seal Collection in Context, is available at escholarship.cdlib.org/ecai/ECAI_series.html. A number of other publications are underway, on topics ranging from Daoism in Sichuan, to the hydrography of Angkor, to the geography of missionary activity in French and Spanish North America.

The Silk Road Atlas, initiated in collaboration with Cal Performances and cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, is now available on-line at www.ecai.org/silkroad. Additional resources are being added to it continuously.

6. ECAI AND INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES

This semester, with funding from the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), we have been working with a number of UC faculty on a pilot project for using digital mapping technology in college classrooms. We have trained a graduate student, held meetings with a classroom technology assessment expert at CSHE, conducted a workshop with interested faculty, and worked one-on-one with several faculty and instructors. We have produced several grant applications based on these activities, and we look forward to continued developments in these areas.

7. CLEARINGHOUSE AND TIMEMAP DEVELOPMENTS

The ECAI clearinghouse (www.timemap.net/clearinghouse/html/index.html) now has a map-based interface. Users can limit searches both by keyword and geographical bounding box. There are almost 1,000 datasets and mapspaces currently in the clearinghouse. The Java version shares similar time bar functionality with the Windows version, and both versions now support full ISO calendar dates down to minutes and seconds. The Windows version can create a simple animation within the interactive map, and has the ability to consult the TimeMap web site to locate the ECAI clearinghouse, adding to the stability of the application. For direction on how to update your current version of TimeMap, see ecai.org/tech/TimeMap_Update.html.

TimeMap for Windows was released as a freely available download in November, with an online form to collect email addresses of people who download it. Please visit
www.timemap.net/download/software.html if you are interested in downloading TimeMap for Windows.

8. DIRECTOR’S ACTIVITIES

Lectures, workshops and symposia by the Director this fall have included: VSMM, Geongjyu, Korea (September); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, lectures on Buddhist Pilgrimage Patterns (August and December); Dongguk University, Seoul, lecture (November); ECAI Korea Team Meeting in Seoul (November); ECAI Japan Team Meeting, Osaka (November); National Science Foundation, Washington DC (December).

9. DO YOU HAVE NEWS?

Directors’ Reports and Newsletters are archived on the ECAI website, at ecai.org/Membersarea/index.html. If you have an item that you would like to have included in the next Directors’ Report or posted on the ECAI website, please send notification to ecai@socrates.berkeley.edu.

Director's Report

December 2002